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I’d like to develope a browser game like an old game on Facebook “Friends for Sale” or FFSNG.
It’s about buying/selling pets representing people with virtual currency.
I don’t know how and where to start. I’m completely new to this. I only know CSS and HTML since I used to make profile themes..
Here’s a link if you don’t understand what I’m trying to say.
Have a great day!

Hi all!
I'm looking for a software that I can use to convert text to a human male and female voice and then save it to an audio file.
I was searching online and did find many converter. But they are not clear regarding that if I can use the audio files for commercial purposes or not.
Could anyone recommend any software that I can definitely use for commercial purposes?
I would appreciate any help.
Thanks.

Hello future and present game designers! I've researched into this topic and even had an interview with a well-known composer about whether I should attend a music school. Acquiring the knowledge, contacts, and confidence in music makes attending one seem like a good choice.
Also, would my school of choice matter in this decision? In my case, the University of Southern California is the more accredited school for video game designers, but the University of Irvine is closer to home (where I won't have to move away).
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

I'm currently working on a POC along with a prototype for my Digital Multimedia Development course. We're talking about crowdsourcing this week, which leaves me with a few questions. How would you sell your idea for a game? I'm sure there are plenty of ways to go about it, but just in a general, step by step fashion, how would you do it? And are there any advantages to crowdsourcing your idea? Crowdsourcing is a pretty new concept for me.

Hi!
How do you calculate tournament timings in online games? For example, if it's morning here (everyone is awake) and if it's night on the other side of the planet (everyone is asleep), then how do you let players all around the world play the tournament? Is it that players have to select their country before starting a game and accordingly the tournament is created for each nation depending on their time zone? Can you give me some examples of games using different methods, if any?
I hope you understand what I'm trying to ask here? Even I'm not sure if I asked the right question?
Thanks!

As the gaming industry advances and evolves, new ideas can suddenly popup and change the way things goes in an instant.
I've worked for 2 years in a Agile-centered startup. I've experienced first hand what agility can do to boost productivity and reduce development cost. It's a really simple and pleasant thing to work with agility, and maybe the gaming industry can benefit from it.
The values
Everybody that knows agility should be able to understand the core values of the Agile Manifesto.
To put it simply, we should value:
Individuals and interactions over process and tools; (i.e. work geographically close rather than remotely or value genuine conversations over Skype)
Working software over comprehensive documentation; In our case, the game MUST be fun (or work correctly) before anything else
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation; Basically, make the player more involved in the game's development
Responding to change over following a plan. This is, of course, directly dependent of point 3
Also, keep in mind that it's mostly an hypothesis. As the manifesto states :
Doing Agile vs. Being Agile
During the past 2 years, our scrum master always warned us about the impostors, or the people that are "Doing Agility". Things like using a Kanban board or doing Daily Scrums wont make your team Agile. It's all about the values.
These tools should be used to apply those values rather than using them just because it's a trend.
For exemple, some teams uses a Scrum backlog while locking it's content to everybody other that the project owner. This puts the project on rails, and can just be a waterfall process disguised as something agile.
How can the gaming industry can benefit from it?
As we keep seeing video games cost more and take a lot more time to develop, the customers grows more and more displeased: There are bugs-a-plenty on crucial mechanics, while relatively small and insignifiant functionalities are well polished and bug-free.
Getting the game as fast as possible in the hands of beta players
The first thing to do is to involve the player as fast as possible in the game development's cycle. Doing that will significantly improve the player's sense of content and can make the game better. In the past, this kind of development wasn't practical, but, with the development of broadband, it's now possible.
Early Access
Nowadays, people talks about "Early Access". For those living under a rock, early access is a way of distributing a game in which the game itself isn't completed in a traditional sense. The customer then buys an somewhat incomplete game, of which many features will come later.
This process is by far the best idea the industry never had.
However, due to some mishandling of said practice, it's now regarded as a sing of cheapness and greed.
If the ones doing it are agile impostors, then yes. There are times where games simply gets abandoned by their maintainer. These instances gives early access some bad name.
Early access should also be used in Agility in a form of customer collaboration. For example, one could ask a random early access player to participate in the planification of a sprint.
If the team isn't confortable with the idea, then maybe a suggestion box can be plugged directly in the backlog...
Prioritizing mechanics based on feedback
Getting feedback form customers is an important thing in Agile Methodologies. The backlog can be prioritized based on player feedback and feature requests.
The same thing can be used on bugs. The more frequent it becomes, the more critical it becomes.
Minimal efforts of development
In most cases, the backlog should be prioritized based on business value rather that complexity. Being so, things that are developed first are important (or so the team thinks) to the game, while less important functions aren't implemented right away and have time to simmer down. Paired with early access, this becomes a quite powerful tool to test out hypothesis and experiment with mechanics.
Due to the iterative process of some methodologies, functionalities are minimal and doesn't require a whole lot of effort to develop: after all, we have no idea if a mechanic is going to be loved or hated by a player until said players plays the game.
Change prone games
Another important argument is that Agility is generally speaking change tolerant. In our case, this means that if the beta players disliked or liked a newly implemented feature, then said feature should be remove and subsequent features should also be re-evaluated.
The importance should always change based on discoveries made by the team or even the project owner. It is considered healthy for a backlog to change it's feature's priority. Otherwise, it's a bad omen...
How about me?
Agile is first and foremost a philosophy, or a way of life. Sure, it can easily be imposed to people, but it's in these situations that you get fake Agility. It should be a conviction more that a rule: a rule should be static and shouldn't change a lot.
Agility starts with the team. If one of it's member isn't committed, it will go sour really fast.
I've seen so many times that Agility can be broken by a malicious person (a saboteur if you will). The best thing you can do to an Agile team is to be, yourself, agile.
------------------------------------------
Agility should be an integral part of game development. With Agile, you can easily prioritize mechanics that are crucial for having a fun and interesting game.

Hi, I'm working on an FPS game and have had no end of problems trying to get my networking off the ground. Right now I'm using snapshot interpolation for lag hiding of remote players. I've been reading basically everything available online about the subject and the theory all makes a bunch of sense but when it get's to implementing it I just get mired down in weird problems and end up doubting the approach completely. I've been stuck on this for too long now and figured it was time to ask for help.
My current approach is trying to keep the client and server ticks synced by using a floating tick offset based on round trip time(and influenced by reported difference between last acked tick + current server tick). What I don't understand is why keeping the 2 in sync matters at all. It seems to me that no matter what, you should be just taking user input off the stack and applying it to the most recent server state, instead of trying to backtrack or wait until the correct tick. You should then send all clients this most recent state with the most recent player command # so the client can reapply those commands. First blush it just feels like keeping the 2 ticks synced is just a way to make resim time more predictable or something?
Also when you're keeping the tick synced on client and server are you also storing game snapshots on the client based on its local state or are you only storing snapshots for frames the server has sent you? If you are only storing snapshots the the server has sent you, it also feels weird to have a tick # on the client at all.
What I keep going back to in my mind is that the server has a tick # and the client just has a list of recent snapshots received from the server and a list of yet-to-be-acknowledged commands. The client processes local input and sends to server with its local command #. Server receives input as quickly as it can(with some small jitter buffer just to keep them spaced out), processes user input received that tick, advances simulation, and sends the most recent gamestate to all clients with their individual command #s. Clients receive update, reapply any commands > the command number received, etc. I don't know if it's just another way of saying basically the same thing but to my brain this makes more sense.
Does that make sense? Am I over thinking this?

Hey everyone!
My name is Aaron and I’m a writer, gamer, and marketer/campaign manager for PowerSpike, a startup in the Twitch space. For the past two years, I’ve had the opportunity to build and run professional Twitch influencer marketing programs for some great brands (a few clients include Soylent, Camp Mobile, CreativeLabs, and more).
I’ve been obsessed with Twitch as both an entertainment and marketing platform since 2014. Before entering the world of marketing, I was a broadcaster and a content creator myself and made YouTube videos in my spare time.
Recently many game developers have shown interest in collaborating with Twitch streamers to promote their games -- and I think I can help!
I’ve learned so much about entertainment and community development from studying the growth of popular streamers since then, and my current position has allowed me to learn an incredible amount about the process of promoting a product/game/service’s message to a large audience with the help of Twitch streamers.
I’d love to share what I’ve learned with anyone who has questions. Ask me anything!
…
If you’d like, you can follow me on Medium at https://medium.com/@aaronmarsden -- that's where I'll be posting both personal and PowerSpike articles on game dev marketing. I also just released my first article, "The Ultimate Guide for Promoting Your Game with Twitch Influencers," here on GameDev.net! You can check it out here:
Thanks everyone!

Hi, im developing a qt application which would benefit form GPU acceleration, therefore i picked CUDA.
However im struggling with connecting Qt and CUDA. I get this error while i build my project. Error while loading shared libraries (ss attached). According to the only one answer i have found it might be PATH variable issue: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mwb7w/cuda_support/libcudart.html , but i had already set them to proper paths (ss attached).
My laptop is running on Ubuntu 18.04 with NVDIA Drivier 396.45. Cuda toolkit-9.2 was installed from runfile downloaded direct from nvidia website.
If somebody has a clue how to solve it or how can i move on ( i even consider switching to other SDK ) please let me know.

Hello, I am seeking some advice on the following procedural events:
I do 3d modeling and music/sfx. In the first game project I contributed to, the concept artist wanted to leave because -- according to him -- there were irreconcilable differences with the project manager on a few matters. To me, aside from his attitude/reactionary problem he had with everyone including myself, it was obvious he was grasping for reasons to leave because he disliked not being in charge. So he left the project and started his own, and surprisingly, he asked if I'd tag along. I said sure, since I had nothing to lose.
In this new project, for the past 6 mths of it's lifespan, there has been little to no cooperation between the Artists and Modelers, plus numerous management issues by the concept artist-now-project manager. The project manager hasn't produced any concept art to help support his own project, despite his decent drawing skills. He also favors the work of this other 3D modeler whom has a nice portfolio, yet hasn't contributed a single item for the project since joining from the start. Meanwhile, I'm uploading numerous concepts, designs and music themes, and no feedback from the mgr except things like "I know you've been uploading a lot of stuff, but could you ___?".
One other dev and I have been trying to do what we can to help the project manager successfully publish his game, despite our busy schedules. And aside from the fact that the project manager dislikes me for some bizarre reason, I put personal issues aside and volunteered to help him out of selfless reasons rather than monetary. While some folks in the project expect compensation sooner or later, I certainly don’t, nor do I need it; I see my contributions as a hobby which I am putting to use whenever I have time off work.
I sometimes feel that even if I 3d modeled an exact replica of the cysteine chapel, or if I composed a musical masterpiece, it wouldn’t be as good to the project manager as a literal potato made by the other 3d modeler.
Also, this other 3d modeler has complimented my work, then has actually deleted the comment moments later. The project manager noticed everything but had no reaction.
The whole situation seems strange to me and I feel I caused most of it. At the moment I feel that my works are not really welcome in the project, and that I’m sort of wasting my time. I'm not looking for credit of my work, but I'm human and I have limits to being disregarded so much.
TL;DR: I enjoy 3d modeling & composing as a hobby, but does the project manager need to obtain assets and music from someone else, someone whose work he's interested in? Or is the project just a lost cause because of no cooperation in general?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: I haven't abandoned the former project and am still actively contributing to it.

Hello everyone!
I want to implement something very basic:
N users on N different computers to see a canvas with N dots.
Each user controls a single dot with his arrow keys
Each user can see all other users' (and his own) dots moving around.
Once a user connects, a corresponding dot appears.
Once a user disconnects, the corresponding dot disappears.
Can you please suggest tutorials, guides and frameworks for me to start learning to implement this?
P.S. I'm a CS graduate, my career path is Real Time / Embedded software, no real work with web / servers before. So if you can suggest relevant courses / bodies of knowledge that are required for this sort of thing, I would be most grateful
Thanks!

I am in the process of learning 3D Modeling of Vehicles. I have already done simple, non-complex items such as Boxes, Billboards and other objects like Barrels. Now I am working on intermediate
Items like small Aircraft and Autos that I am comprising of several components. For example : Wings , fuselage, engine(s) and Tires/Wheels.
My question is this, Should I Texture/Skin each Item Separately or Join all Items together to form the Final Model, then UV Unwrap The complete model and Create the Texture / Skin.
Any and all advice would be appreciated. Any other words of wisdom would also be appreciated. I would be willing to accept any private tutoring and share any of my models with those that help.

Hi all,
My name is Supereor. I recently developed a game titled Night of the Red Cubes: Crimson Tide (link here if you are curious), and now that it's on the Play Store, I am wondering if there is any good way to market it and get it to people that might be interested in it. I am all for fixing bugs and trying to listen to people that have issues with it, but the game has no community at the moment to tell me what's wrong. I totally understand that the Play Store likely has thousands of new games coming out every week for it, but I wonder if there is any way to get your game noticed among them, or if it is a lost cause altogether.
Does anyone has any tips on how to market a game on the Play Store (preferably tips that won't cost too much)? Or even feedback on why you wouldn't play it?

It's been about 15 years since I made music. Back in those days I would make my songs strictly out of MIDI using RealityGM or CHAOS Soundfont libraries.
Over the past 15 years I've slowly collected a variety of instruments, VSTs, Plugins for FLStudio and samples. Now that Im finally making music again (with horrible chord theory now ) I'm noticing my sound quality is better and much louder using these Plugins and VST. Everything except MIDI.
How can I boost the sound of MIDI samples in FLStudio or boost the sound of my whole song in post production without distorting or ruining anything? Any feedback on the songs is welcome too. You can be harsh. Here are examples of what I'm making today. Notice the sound is at a decent level that matches most streaming services. These are using 85% VST and samples. Most of my volumes are 25 - 50%. https://soundcloud.com/tashawn-nicholas/clashing_draft?in=tashawn-nicholas/sets/me
https://soundcloud.com/tashawn-nicholas/relay-point?in=tashawn-nicholas/sets/me
https://soundcloud.com/tashawn-nicholas/d03?in=tashawn-nicholas/sets/me
Now here is my trouble song. Its lead instrument is a MIDI instrument. It is RealityGM flute. Its volume is MAXED. All of my other instruments are around 10 - 15% volume. If they get any louder they drown out the lead instrument. https://soundcloud.com/tashawn-nicholas/pipes?in=tashawn-nicholas/sets/me
NOTE: These differences in volume mostly show themselves in car speaker systems and headphones. Not so much on laptop speakers or standard PC speakers.

Hello everyone,
My name is Jorge. First of all excuse me if this is not the right place to put this.
I’m a freelance illustrator and concept artist and I was planning to relaunch my portfolio online but more focused in giving help to video game developers on the “look” of their games.
In order to know a bit more, I made this little poll with Google Forms and it would be great if you had some time to answer it:
Google Form
There aren’t many questions but it would help me a lot to know a bit more about the field I want to focus on. I’m trying to post this on as much forums as possible to get
Thank you so much for your time.
Sincerely,
Jorge

Hi everyone.
I guess this would be another one of 'those' questions.
I'm a .NET programmer and I've been developing games in Unity for 3 years now, and recently finished my 5th game. But in some sense, I feel like I've reached a barrier. I don't want to disregard Unity in any way, neither UE4 (that I used for a month or so), but in the last days, I'm feeling some urge to have more freedom in the development of my projects. That's when the idea of rolling my game from the ground up came back to mind.
Besides wanting to have more control over some low-level details of the game, I want a more close control over the scene system especially to use my own map editor. And obviously, I'm exciting by the learning perspectives.
If I use an engine again, I would go with Godot. And although I know I could expand Godot to my needs, that's unlikely to happen because I'll get easily overwhelmed by the engine and the lack of a good C++ API specific documentation (the engine one is good though).
So I'm here to ask for your personal opinion. I know C/C++ good enough to start, and I've already toyed around with OpenGL. I also love this topic and data-oriented approaches.
Should I use SDL, Allegro? Irrlicht, Urho, Ogre? Maybe build upon Cube or Torque? I'd like to learn while doing it, but how much work would be to write a simple render in pure SDL? And adding shadows or shaders?
Should I follow HandmadeHero maybe?
- I'm planning on Windows support, but with porting in mind. Starting with 2D and hoping on diving in 3D soon.
- I'm not building an engine, but a game.
Thank you all!

Hello!
I am currently enrolled in Game Programming and Development and I have been jumping around between multiple specialties, including programming disciplines and graphic design. I just wanted to gather some perspective on the Game Design specialization and if you think it's prudent, as a beginner finishing up school, to start out in QA or a similarly related field as I expand my portfolio before I try to dive into game design? After reviewing some of the qualifications for game design jobs, I noticed that the majority of studios want 2-3 years of experience, so I wanted to gauge the best direction to jump-start a design focus as I wrap up my academic terms. Any advice is very much appreciated!

Hello everyone!
I want to implement something very basic:
N users on N different computers to see a canvas with N dots.
Each user controls a single dot with his arrow keys
Each user can see all other users' (and his own) dots moving around.
Once a user connects, a corresponding dot appears.
Once a user disconnects, the corresponding dot disappears.
Can you please suggest tutorials, guides and frameworks for me to start learning to implement this?
P.S. I'm a CS graduate, my career path is Real Time / Embedded software, no real work with web / servers before. So if you can suggest relevant courses / bodies of knowledge that are required for this sort of thing, I would be most grateful
Thanks!

Dear GameDevs,
I am plan on creating a video game. However, before I start creating the game, I would like to interview a game developer to understand a bit about the whole process of creating a game. The interview will be conducted via Skype video call or Skype Chat (I can also do discord) and will be very short (5-10 minutes). I want to interview any game developer (beginner or experienced).
Regards,
Shreyas
Edit 1: Grammer

Hello,
I'm wrapping up my Game Programming and Development program at the end of December. Right now, I'm concentrating on gameplay programming and I'm doing everything I can to make my resume as attractive as possible. I'm graduating with a 4.0, have been inducted into an honor society, and volunteer my time/writing for an online publication service. Despite this, I'm noticing almost all job postings I've reviewed require at least one year of experience in the field on the low end. Has anyone landed an entry level game development job right out of college? Is this a rare thing? I've had two call backs from Revature and Syntel. I've heard mixed reviews of both, but taking a job from either would get my foot in the door and give me some professional IT experience. I'd obviously prefer to start at a game dev studio. Is it possible to start at a game development company right out of college? If so, what steps I should take to ensure that I can do this? I'm working on a portfolio and have registered my own dot com. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone,We are a team of two working for the past few months on a project and we would be very happy to hear your opinion / feedback on the ideas behind it. The project is called Arcweave and it is a web-based flowchart-like tool to design, organize and scale game design and story content.It all started 6 months ago, when after a few game jams we decided to start working on a bigger game project. I began writing the GDD on a google doc but very soon found out that i was in need of additional features to properly maintain and scale my game design. I wanted to be able to:- Develop branching storylines and dialogue in a visual and easily readable format- Write things down for my characters, locations, items e.t.c and easily access this information from different parts of the story- Create an overview of the game and then "dive" in each part of the story and start fleshing out the details- Share my progress with the other members of the team so that they could comment on it and give me feedback.Based on these needs we looked around for a tool that did something like this but could not find anything close to our requirements, so we decided to build it ourselves. Fast forward 6 months and here are some screenshots of how the tool looks so far:
We plan on releasing a closed beta in a few weeks. Τhe MVP will initially support the following:- Create and connect story elements in a flowchart layout and add labels on the connections- Multi-select, copy/cut/paste elements- Create components (e.g. characters, locations, items) and add image/text inputs in them- Attach components to elements- Mention a component inside the story content using the @ character (mentioned components dynamically change when they are renamed)- Create multiple boards- Attach boards to elements for quick access.- Create multiple projects- Autosave projects/boards on the cloudWe are looking forward to your comments, ideas and feedback. Also we greatly welcome any suggestions as to if/how you would like this tool to move forward and how it could help your workflow, as well as if you would like to participate in the closed beta stage.Finally if you want to get notified on the progress updates follow the project on Twitter here: @arcweaveCheers!

I'm working on an ECS model for a C++ game I'm developing. I feel like I've gotten a good grasp on the ECS model, however, I'm struggling to determine how I should actually organize and store the components. This question has been raised by the dilemma of how I want my engine to iterate over my components and systems.
Here are two routes I could see myself going:
1) Store all components within entities themselves. This model would involve me creating an object pool of an entity type. Each entity type would contain a specific set of components relevant to that entity (e.g. graphics component, physics component, health component, etc.)
I would then register this object pool with the appropriate system (e.g. physics system) which would then iterate over the objects as necessary.
Pros: My systems would only have to iterate over entities that are known to have relevant components. Since the entities contain the actual components, the act of initializing each entity is (subjectively) easier.
Cons: I need to register multiple object pools with each system (e.g. projectiles and enemies both have health components, thus I would need to register each object pool to the health system).
2) Store all components of the same type in a container and then give my entities references to these components. I would then register a single component container with a system (e.g. give the physics component array to the physics system). The system would then only need to iterate over a single container instead of multiple containers.
I'm envisioning that all components are held within their respective system (e.g. physics system contains an array of physics components). Each entity would then contain a reference (pointer or ID handle) to an individual component.
My entities would then essentially become objects that just contain references to components, but not the actual components themselves.
Pros: The entire concept or register object pools to each system becomes obsolete, and each system only has to iterate over a single container.
Cons: The process of initializing an entity becomes (subjectively) difficult. For example, to create a projectile, I would need to request individual components from each system. It then becomes possible that during the creation of an entity, I'm able to obtain one component but obtain another. Thus the entity is only partially created. I would need to account for all of these fail cases.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on either option?

Hello Everyone,
So I have built a few basic games both in C++ and in Unreal, but am wanting to do something different. I absolutely love rogue-like games like Binding of Isaac. So for this next game, I wanted to try to build a game like Binding of Isaac in Unreal. I believe I understand how to do a large portion of the UI, Gameplay, Camera, etc. The part I am struggling with is the world generation. I have found a few resources regarding this topic, but I am not sure how to fully implement due to the lack of resources addressing this topic.
I have a few questions:
Is it better to build off of a Perlin noise type algorithm or are there simpler models to do this with?
What algorithms currently exist to make sure the rooms fit together well without overlap on a generation?
Should the rooms be built as blueprint segments or be built in real time using code?
Lastly, are there any great resources out there that I may have missed regarding random room generation in Unreal?
Thank you guys for your time!

The purpose of this is to get me started in a direction as far as knowing what to look at or evaluate. I need either a library, or an engine. I could consider cannibalizing source to make something custom, if necessary. A few things:
- Open source, and/or free.
- 2D.
- Realtime.
- At a minimum I will need collision detection. I may go full-bore physics, but it won't need to be super-fancy - e.g. complicated joints, rag doll dynamics, etc. - it would just need to be basic collision physics.
- As for platforms, no Microsoft, no .NET, no C#, etc. Also, it would need to be either OpenGL, or something like that which is 'standard' and freely available. At a minimum, this would run on Linux, preferably FreeBSD.
- Would prefer non-Java. If I'm having to compile something, or link into some library, best would probably be C/C++.
- This is important. I need something parallelizable. Meaning, I would like to run a bunch of 'whatever' I will be using (engines or whatever) on multiple cores, possibly even multiple machines, and I would like them to ALL tackle the SAME problem. Just think of some big simulation, with multiple processors producing the simulation.
- Performance is a concern.
- I don't know how hardware acceleration factors into this, if at all. I know it is generally used for the graphics. But here, my concern is the collision resolution, and possibly the physics, but not the graphics at this juncture. So, you tell me.